Yeah the symbol explode trick only works to convert symbol attributes to plain text if thew attribute exists in a symbol that is being exploded. One thing you could do to convert all symbol attributes to plain text is create a symbol out of all of them and then explode that symbol by doing the following. Force save just in case Turn all your layers on in the drawing (or just the layers that have symbol attributes on them you want to convert). Then use Clipboard Select, and set F5 Mask to F1 Entity, S7 Scroll Forward, F3 Sym Attribute, S0 Exit, S0 Exit, then use Ctrl+A to Select All (or use EGAFs to select all of the symbol attributes manually). Turn S2 Insert Pnt. off, then select S4 Cut. All of your symbol attributes should disappear. Then use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste as a symbol, hit Enter to accept the randomly generated symbol name. Set your input mode to Absolute Cart or Absolute Polar. Make sure the Ins Symbol menu is set so F6 By Center and F7 Exploded is off, and that your enlargement factors are all set to 1. Then hit space bar and hit enter twice to insert the symbol at absolute zero. Now you can use Symbol Explode, Original Layers, with Conv. Attribs turned on to convert all of the symbol attributes to plain text and explode all of them to their original layers and locations.

Thanks Josh for taking the time to write all of steps down for us. For some reason though I am unable to get that to work for me. Maybe its just that I don't understand DataCAD well enough. If you ever have the time, check out these symbols that I created and let me know if there is anything about these that would make them not convert to text using the sequence of steps that you described. I put them into a drawing and mistakenly assumed that if anyone else in the office did not like them that they would be able to just explode them down to single line by using the explode command. Boy was I wrong about that